“Mary got up and hurried to a city in the Judean highlands. She entered Zechariah’s home and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. With a loud voice, she blurted out, “God has blessed you above all women, and he has blessed the child you carry. Why do I have this honor, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? As soon as I heard your greeting, the baby in my womb jumped for joy. Happy is she who believed that the Lord would fulfill the promises he made to her.”
- Luke 1:39-45
I love this story so much. The meeting between Mary and Elizabeth is one of the relatively few passages in Scripture that passes the Bechtel–Wallace test - an assessment of women's roles in cultural narratives that first appeared in the work of Alison Bechdel in 1985. (To pass the test, two or more women must be named and have a conversation with each other about something other than a man.) This highlights the importance of this meeting where two women are filled with the power of the spirit and offer some of the boldest proclamations of God's goodness to be found anywhere in Scripture.
This story has universal implications and applies to all of us, Christian or not...
What does Mary do after the angel announces she will give birth to Jesus? She dashes off to visit her cousin, Elizabeth! Like Mary, when the spirit moves us, what do we do? When we get great news or are hit by a new insight?
We too feel an urge to run to others. The burgeoning life within us draws us into community. God’s love always calls us out of isolation and into togetherness.
How do we deepen a loving connection with our human neighbors and our other-than-human kin, the flora and fauna that share this world with us?
Whatever these things are, when they are done with the joy of the spirit, they aren’t done with heaviness or obligation. Rather, they’re done because we just can’t help it.
How can anyone restrict the flow of the divine love that we see between these two women and the babies bouncing in their bellies?
In the incarnation, the birth of Jesus, we see something profound. In this story, God’s majesty is ripped out of the clouds as a booming, judgemental, and abstract concept.
It’s like God knows that we have it wrong. It’s like God knows that God needs to be revealed as God truly is. The One that created the universe, who sparked the big bang, whose masterpiece is evolution, and who rejoices in the diversity of the world -
THIS ONE... Is WITH us.
Not in opposition to us.
In Jesus, ‘Emmanuel’…
The name means, “God is with us.”
Not… “God will be with us when we do/don’t do x, y, and z.”
Not… “God is with THEM and if we could only live like them, then God will be with us.”
In this story, God does not reveal Godself on a golden throne with a spear in hand. God does not reveal Godself in the belly of one who lived in a mighty palace. No...
In this story, God reveals Godself in the womb of a woman on the run from government officials; a woman with meager means; and a woman filled with the fire of love from the holy spirit.
No, friends... Mary is no meek and meager figurine. Mary is a broken and beautiful force to be reckoned with. Though she held no great material wealth, though she was lowly and looked down upon by the world around her, she accepted her undeserved acceptance and said yes to being the carrier of the God who entered the world to show that God is WITH US, not where you and I might look in the high places, but right here in the muck. This story of Jesus reveals a loving God who comes in flesh, not to punish us, but to RECONCILE us. To be with us.
It is in the depth of our waiting - right here in the darkness of Advent - that we see this so starkly. Without the darkness of the womb, the baby never grows. Without the dark nurturing soil, the plants never sprout. Without the deepening dark of Advent, we never reach the nativity.
You are invited deeply into the holiness of night.
Amen.
“You are invited deeply into the holiness of night.“ Amazing article!